Constellation Brands case study

Overview

Constellation Brand (CBI)  is a Fortune 500 company dedicated to providing over 100 brands of alcoholic beverages globally. The outcome was a  redesigned internal facing mobile app  to help CBI employees to become better ambassadors of their company brands. 

Understanding the challenge

CBI came to our team with the task of improving their existing internal facing mobile platform called the Ambassador App. It’s key function was a product locator serving as the company’s only internal facing app that connects all of their brand’s portfolios to their employees. However, they faced some challenges as the platform was a version of their internal sales app called “Compass” which was only intuitive for their existing users, the sales employees. The challenge was to create an improved platform that could encourage employees to consume and recommend more CBI products. 

Understanding client goals

Diving into research

SUBJECT MATTER EXPERTS

We interviewed two subject matter experts at CBI to understand the original intention of the Ambassador app, and how often  it was being used. Because the Ambassador is a stripped down version of their sales app, it was unintuitive for other employees besides the ones in sales.

DOMAIN RESEARCH

In our domain research, we learned that the demand for alcoholic drinks is growing at a faster rate and premiumization is driving the Alcoholic Beverage Market. We found that consumers value quality over quantity. This gave us an idea of what the users would find most useful and engaging.

COMPETITIVE ANALYSIS

Driven from our SME interviews, we looked at direct and indirect competitors that offer Social, Events, Alcohol Service.  This gave us an idea  where Ambassador has the opportunity to exist in the marketplace.

We looked at what they were doing well:

Synthesizing insights

We started our affinity map by reviewing our user interviews and grouping key insights into three categories:

1. Something Positive

2. Something Negative

3. Opportunity

These categories traced affinities between subsets of groups and through resorting, emerged into more visible patterns.

Our main insights and findings were

Defining the problem

Who: The brand conscious CBI employee

What: A digital platform to access brand information

Why: To share and promote their products to grow relationships and celebrate the brand with friends and family

The brand conscious CBI employee needs a digital platform to access brand information because they want to share and promote their products to grow relationships, and celebrate the brand with friends and family.

Design principle

Now that we had a clearer view of the problem users faced, we created four design guidelines to help influence our design decisions to make a product that was engaging and easy to use.

Customer Journey map

Ideas to solutions

CONCEPT VALIDATION

After closely following our customer journey map, we came up with 9 concepts to address the pain points of Abigail and to align with our problem statement. We sketched and tested concepts on paper to quickly gauge the desirability of our ideas.

Access brand info

With these concepts, we aimed to find how users would prefer to learn about CBI products.

Share and promote CBI products

With these concepts, we aimed to find how users would like to engage with others

Celebrate the brand

With these concepts, we wanted find to what extent users wanted to promote their company portfolio

What ideas worked

What ideas didn’t work

MAIN TAKEAWAY

Overall, our concept testing helped us to understand what users wanted most. Users weren’t as concerned with concepts of sending a gift or sharing their stipends, as they were with accessible brand information and location. We narrowed down our concepts to 4 and developed mid-fidelity prototypes to test usability with. 

Putting our concepts to test

Once we created our mid-fidelity wireframes, we put them in front of users to get their feedback. We interviewed 2 CBI employees and 4 non CBI employees to complete scenarios and tasks. Our goal from testing was to answer the following questions:

Final Design

Moving forward, we decided to drop Track allowance concept because it didn’t directly align with our problem statement. We took all the positive points of feedback and combined the remaining  three concepts into one converged product. We envisioned the new Ambassador app to provide brand education and help support CBI employee’s brand loyalty.

Future consideration